Keeping Web Discussions Open, Yet Civilized?

gsnedders asks: "With the rise of 'Web 2.0' and user created content, often in the form of comments, how do you keep the discussion open, yet civilized? I've found Slashdot's moderation to be very good — the good stuff gets moderated up, and the bad stuff down. On Digg, correct and valid information often gets dugg down, and offensive comments up, showing that having an open moderation system doesn't always work. However, moderation like on Slashdot, requires a large numbers of users to have enough moderators without giving everyone moderator access, therefore making it impossible to use on smaller sites. How can you keep the discussion civilized, while keeping commenting open, and not requiring large numbers of users for the moderation to work?"

Comments

Things that have been sucessful

[also-rr]

Group moderation like Slashdot -Pro, very hands off (once past a critical mass of users). -Con, promotes group think.

Wikipedia style moderation -Pro, very hands off (once past a larger critical mass of users). -Con, promotes group think.

Direct moderation (approval of everything) -Pro, very accurate. -Con, very time consuming.

Retroactive moderation (normal form style - post first delete spam later) -Pro, very accurate. -Con, very time consuming and crap still shows up until it's dealt with.

I have never seen a working system that was not based on one of these principles. Things that have failed:

Anything with no moderation at all. Look at usenet. These systems are only sucessful if combined with user filtering - one prospective area might be a system with very good user filtering, but then you shift the burden from the admin to the users and why should they bother when there are people willing to do the work for them?

To give you an idea here is a small graph of spam activity. It took 5 days for comment spammers to find an open site and start abusing it, and once they find something that has worked once they just dont stop. And that's even before you consider the malicious idiots who aren't exactly spammers but just twist and distort and abuse other posters - how do you deal with them exactly?

Re:What about a Spam Filter

[hankwang]

One thing I've done on my site is bayasian filtering of new comments.

Interesting idea. How well does it work as expressed in false/true positive/negative rates?

I can use those two corpuses (corpii?) to filter against.

Corpora. In Latin there is no such thing as an -ii ending, which is only used in l33tsp34k virus/virii. Corpus is a 3rd declension word with neuter gender.

Re:Slashdot selects moderators automatically

[Knightking]

You have to post occasionally, but posting too much pushes you over median very quickly. This will be my 25th post in the last 18 months, which is apparently fairly close to median, as I generally get mod points multiple times a week.